Associate Professor Gavin Huttley

The Australian National University

Associate Professor Gavin Huttley is head of the Computational Genomics laboratory and head of the Genome Discovery Unit, in the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. He obtained a B.Sc (Hons) from Macquarie University in Sydney, a PhD in Molecular Population Genetics from the University of California, Riverside and undertook postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute (USA) before returning to Australia. His research seeks to apply evolutionary principles to biomedical problems.

Extracting information from DNA sequences using models of sequence evolution

Examination of biological sequences can reveal many aspects of living systems. For instance, analysis of DNA sequence variation can be used to assess the relationship between organisms, properties of DNA repair systems or the operation of Darwinian natural selection. Markov models of sequence evolution are central to these efforts. I will discuss Markov models of DNA sequence evolution and how they are used within a phylogenetic framework to dissect evolutionary dynamics.